Microsoft Codenames

If you are interested in Microsoft Technologies and keep track of Microsoft products and technologies you would have already noticed that Microsoft has a unique codename for every project. Microsoft products start life as a project codename. Exactly how these codenames are decided remains a mystery, and indeed some suggest that there is meaning to be found hidden in their selection. Such a theory is encouraged by the eagerness with which Microsoft representatives suggest that we should not attach too much significance to codenames, even implying the names are selected almost at random.

I am personally a fan of Microsoft codenames. The problem is that, with the amount projects Microsoft is working on, it’s really hard for us to keep track of all the codenames. Below you will find a list of product codenames and their derivations:

Codename

Product

Derivation

DEVELOPMENT TOOLS

Thunder

Visual Basic

Boston

Visual Studio 97

Blackbird

Internet Studio, a development environment for MSN which eventually became Visual InterDev.

Aspen

Visual Studio 98 (6.0)

Ski resort in Colorado.

Jakarta

Visual J++ 6.0

Capital of Indonesia, located on the island of Java.

Cool

C#

Short for ‘C-based Object-Oriented Language’.

Rainier

Visual Studio .NET

Mount Rainier is a dormant volcano south of Seattle.

Everett

Visual Studio .NET 2003

Town north of Seattle.

Whidbey

Visual Studio .NET 2005

Island north of Seattle.

Whitehorse

Design tools supplied with Visual Studio .NET 2005

Capital of Yukon Territory in Canada which became famous during the Klondike Gold Rush.

Burton

Visual Studio 2005 Team System

Unknown, although it is the name of a North American manufacturer of snowboards.

Orcas

Successor to VS.NET 2005 for developing ‘Longhorn’ applications

Island north of Whidbey.

Hawaii

Successor to ‘Orcas’

An island ‘much further out’ than Orcas or Whidbey. Also, where the development team plan to celebrate its completion.

OPERATING SYSTEMS

Janus

Windows 3.1

Sparta

Windows for Workgroups 3.1

Snowball

Windows for Workgroups 3.11

Daytona

Windows NT 3.5

Cairo

Collected technologies that may eventually come to fruition in Longhorn.

Capital of Egypt on the river Nile.

Impala

Windows NT4 Embedded

Chicago

Windows 95

The windy city.

Nashville

Internet Explorer 4 Desktop Update for Windows 95

The home of country music, in Tennessee.

Memphis

Windows 98

City in Tennessee.

Whistler

Windows XP

Mountain in Canadian ski resort around four hours drive north of Seattle. (The ‘XP’ stands for eXPerience.)